That’s definitely not going to happen. One of the few things Windows is doing right is backwards compatibility. Have 30 year old exe? It usually just runs fine. In my experience a lot of business logic relies on this compatibility. It would be stupid from a business standpoint to break this compatibility. It would upset a lot of paying customers.

But wait a second. I’m speaking about Microsoft. All we wanted was a Windows 7 with a modernized GUI. And we got Windows 10 with Cortana, multiple Control panels, redundant settings that contradicted each other. We got Windows 11 with ads everywhere, Copilot, enforced MS accounts and so on.

It would perfectly make sense to switch to Linux. They could fire a lot of devs. I’m sure they would save a lot of money for a couple of seconds.

Obviously they don’t give a shit about customers, so this sounds like a normal thing Microsoft could do for short term gains.

I knew I was going to find a comment about the Model M!

I use the modern incarnation made by Unicomp since 2019. Best Keyboard I ever had and probably my main keyboard for the rest of my life. It’s really that good! Minimal wear on the buttons after 6 years (I’m a developer so the keyboard gets used once in a while 😉)

One thing I wanted to mention: Although I like the clicky sound, it is quite loud. It was loud enough that I woke up my little baby girl when working at night. So I had to silence it or buy another keyboard 😔 I ended up with fiddling dental floss inside of every single spring and used o rings to dampen the noise it makes when you hit the buttons hard and they bottom out. I’d say you get 80-90% of the tactility with 30% of the noise. Perfect combo in my opinion.

That’s not correct. You can just walk into a shop, show some papers, pay ~3,5k€ and buy a H&K MR308 or some other semi auto rifle if you like.

But getting this privilege costs quite a bit of work and money: You have to go to a hunting school, learn a lot of stuff, prove that you’ve really learned everything, show you are able to use weapons in a safe manner, prove your ability to shoot etc. Also you get screened by the police on a regular basis. And if you ever get in serious trouble with the law the chances are high you’ll lose everything.

So it’s not like in other countries, that basically having at least one finger is enough to operate a Gatling gun in your backyard 😉

It’s way too much. The value in this case is so high because it’s an old historic firearm.

With modern production capabilities you can buy brand new rifles for ~1000€ or handguns for a couple or 100€s. They just shoot as straight, if not better. Modern assault rifles cost around 1500-5000€s the last time I checked. Without full auto mode though, because they are illegal for civilians here in Germany (no civilian needs an assault rifle IMO). But technically/price wise I imagine the difference to be negligible between the two variants.

But some weapons from that period were masterpieces. Back then they had more or less only manually operated machines that needed a lot of experience and skill. A Mauser 98 for example can still be bought as a new weapon today. A century old design built today costs 10000€ upwards.